From our ‘foreign correspondent’ John Colombi
Being in the wind industry it is quite easy, without noticing it, to become a turbine spotter. Pointing out wind farms when you spot them is one thing, but naming the make, model and year installed may come across as excessively geeky, particularly when the people you are with have no idea what an E66 pitch regulated 1.5MW turbine is.
I have just embarked on a trip to Aurich, Germany to see our turbine suppliers; Enercon, at their HQ. As the journey started, I found myself looking out of the window and scanning the land below for turbines. The first came at the start of the journey, the 3 turbines at Avonmouth docks, the next some time later just as we left UK airspace in the form of a medium sized offshore site. But that was it.
As we started flying over Germany the story couldn’t have been more gloriously different. I was treated to wind farm after wind farm, of all shapes and sizes and for miles and miles around. What really struck me was that for almost every village, town, industrial estate, or farm, there was a wind farm adjacent. In fact, the scale of the wind farm seemed to fit with the scale of the settlement – more houses, more turbines. It would certainly seem that the wind farms are generating the energy where it is being consumed.
When we got to Aurich, I was in my element, everywhere you look you can see them, always well positioned, tidy and well maintained. In a single view I could see smaller, older turbines from about 15 years ago as well as Enercon’s huge new 7.5MW E126 turbine (at nearly 200m to tip, it is double the size of the new turbines at Delabole and over 3 times as powerful). And the best bit – in 2010 wind power supplied 50% of the state’s electricity.
It is obvious to see that the German people embraced onshore wind technology some time ago, and in a big way. There is a notable difference in attitude compared with the UK - people are proud and knowledgeable about the wind industry. The taxi driver who picked us up from the airport spoke enthusiastically, and at length, about wind turbines, we discussed his favourite model and he praised Enercon for what they have done for the area and for the country.
They are right to feel this way, Enercon have quite an operation here. A lot of the other main turbine manufacturers sub-contract the production of a lot of their turbine parts including blades and towers, Enercon prefer to do as much as possible themselves. In addition to their assembly facilities they also have their own foundry for making the turbine moulds and a concrete facility for their concrete tower production. They even reinstated an old railway line adjacent to their factory to allow them to transport more by rail, saving 1200 truck loads every year; brilliant.
Enercon employ around 4000 people here alone, and have other production facilities around the world. No doubt this plays a major part in people’s attitudes towards the turbines, but they don’t just tolerate them because Enercon bring employment, they actually love them and they are proud of them. It reminds me of the sort of feeling you get from the people at Delabole, the sense of pride they have for ‘their’ turbines.
An argument often made by the anti-wind farm lobby is that onshore wind brings limited long term employment to the area. But what company is going to risk investing huge sums of money in bringing production or service facilities of this scale, or any scale, to an area where they cannot sell turbines because their potential customers cannot get planning permission to develop? Enercon’s sales teams get a huge amount of calls and emails from the UK enquiring about their turbines but most of those come to nothing, often because of planning delays or rejections.
In 2009 turbine manufacturer Vestas closed its factory on the Isle of Wight. The then Labour government tried to get them to stay, offering subsidies and urging them to work on producing onshore turbine blades for the UK. But Vestas did not just want money, they wanted a market place. They wanted customers who had permission to buy and install their turbines. This was not happening in the UK despite our abundance of wind resource.
The environmental argument for onshore wind turbines is supported by an economic one. The UK needs a better planning regime so that the wind industry can have the confidence in our marketplace to invest in bringing their businesses here. It seems slightly odd that a country with less wind resource than us can have such an impressive, buoyant and healthy wind industry compared with our own.
